The Rat, the Cheese, and the Lever: Using Emojis as a Boundary Tool

I saw an Instagram post the other day that made me laugh out loud. It was an older woman, sunglasses on, champagne in hand, giving this piece of advice: change his contact name in your phone to five hearts, and every time he messes up, delete one. No more wasting time once he's out of lives.

The "out-of-lives" video game reference made me laugh. And it reminded me of my own version of using emojis to set boundaries.

I have a couple of contacts who I love, but who I learned — after enough repetitions — leave me feeling worse every time I go to them for support. I'd call wanting comfort and hang up feeling dismissed, criticized, or completely unseen. I'd send a text message venting and receive unhelpful advice or silence back. But I just kept trying to lean on these people as my supports. Because surely this time would be different.

That "surely this time will be different" feeling has a name (it’s intermittent reinforcement), and it's the exact mechanism that keeps a rat pressing a lever in a Skinner box. If a lever always shocks you, you stop pressing it fast. But if it sometimes gives you cheese and sometimes shocks you? You will press that lever forever, chasing the cheese, because the unpredictability is what hooks you. Occasional connection is more addictive than reliable disconnection — our brains are wired to keep gambling on the good outcome.

In order to protect my peace and break the cycle of reaching out, hoping for an emotionally intelligent response that would never come, I updated my contacts with the rat and cheese emojis next to their names. A simple reminder that when I need support and validation, these are not my people. 🐀🧀

When I see it, it's my reminder to pause. To take a two-second gut check: do I actually want to press this lever again? Am I looking for cheese, or am I about to get shocked? Reminding yourself you have a choice, and setting boundaries around who you turn to, can be powerful.

We talk a lot about boundaries like they require a big conversation, a script, a showdown. And sometimes they do. But sometimes a boundary is just building yourself a two-second pause between the urge and the action — a tiny, visual, even funny reminder that says hey, remember what actually happens here.

Try it. Look at your contacts. Is there a lever in there you keep pressing, hoping for cheese? Give it an emoji. Let future-you have the information present-you keeps forgetting in the moment.

And if this is a pattern you want to dig into further — where it comes from, why it's so hard to stop reaching for people who leave us feeling worse, and how to build sturdier boundaries across the board — that's exactly what my Building Better Boundaries Workshop is for. It's a quick, on-demand training to help you stop people-pleasing and start setting limits without guilt.

You don't need a rat and cheese emoji for every relationship in your life — but for the ones that keep shocking you, it might just save you a whole lot of wasted time and pain.